Comprehensive (1300 pages!) detailing of the continuing insanity of US (Western) policy on Israel and the Middle East and how this has come to fruition in the Bush-led debacle of invaded Iraq. Confirms what I had thought all along, and adds details and facts to support the view. Particularly poignant in coverage of the Palestinians – who have so lost hope that they now grow suicide bombers. Until the West forces Israel to come to some lasting settlement with the Palestinians, they will never have the “security” that their retaliation to the suicide bombings is intended to deliver. Read March 2008 ( )

Nobody does it like Fisk. One to trust. ( )

Perhaps not as readable as Fisk's collection of opinion writing--Age of the Warrior--this is nonetheless a fascinating work of journalist history cum autobiography. ( )

This book was hard to classify--history? or current affairs? Nor is it about terrorism, but it covers the author's half century of reporting experience in the middle east. It includes important information as well as interpretation for those interested in the world of Islam and how it came to be the way it is now. I intend to reread a little slower and check out some sources, but I'll go for four start for now. ( )

I used to be a rabid Fisk-hater, and I like to think that few could touch me on that score. Then along came the debacle of Iraq, and I was foolish enough to actually read him. My problem now, is how to even attempt to do justice to this book.

If you want to know how the world actually is, instead of how you thought it was, read this book. Because he isn't just a theoriser or a commentator or a pundit. His own two eyes have seen it. The case he makes is ironclad and inescapable, because he was actually *there*, in the heart of the world, for fifteen years. But politics in itself can only engage the intellect; it can't move you to tears. Only human stories can do that. Not once, ever, does Fisk talk about politics - wars and systems and corruptions and what-have-you - in a vacuum. Always, the focus comes right in close to the resulting agony and loss inflicted on a single human being or a family. No book has ever made me shed so many tears as this. A propagandist? A manipulator? Hardly. He isn't a Chomsky sitting at a desk three thousand miles away. How do you put 'spin' on a burnt child you have personally witnessed writhing in a hospital?

It would be a superb book if it stopped at this, a summing-up of what he has learned and witnessed. But there is a good deal more in this huge and panoramic book; in keeping with the theme of politics being about individual human lives, he uses his own father, a WW1 survivor and a man he didn't like, as a kind of talisman for the history of the 20th century. Then again, there are some very funny stories included too, as one might expect to be accrued by a war correspondent on active duty. I wonder if there's another book in the world which can single-handedly remove as much ignorance as this one? I have to say, I rather doubt it. ( )